The Keep Page 4

  They put their feet on the wall above and beside the block, each with both hands on the belt, then threw their aching backs, legs, and arms into extracting the stubborn stone. With a high-pitched scrape of protest, it began to move, shimmying, shuddering, sliding. Then it was out. They pushed it to the side and Lutz fumbled for a match.

  “Ready to be rich?” He lit the kerosene lamp and held it to the opening. Nothing but darkness within.

  “Always,” Grunstadt replied. “When do I start counting?”

  “Soon as I get back.”

  He adjusted the flame, then began to belly-crawl through the opening, pushing the lamp ahead of him. He found himself in a narrow stone shaft, angled slightly downward…and only four feet long. The shaft ended at another stone block, identical to the one they had just struggled so long and so hard to move. Lutz held the lamp close to it. This cross looked like gold and silver, too.

  “Give me the bayonet,” he said, reaching his hand back to Grunstadt. The handle of the bayonet slapped into his waiting palm.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Roadblock.”

  For a moment Lutz felt defeated. With barely room for one man in the narrow shaft, it would be impossible to remove the second stone that faced him. The whole wall would have to be broken through, and that was more than he and Grunstadt could hope to accomplish on their own, no matter how many nights they worked at it. He didn’t know what to do next, but he had to satisfy his curiosity as to the metals in the inlaid cross before him. If the upright was gold, he would at least be sure that he was on the right track.

  Grunting as he twisted within the confinement of the shaft, Lutz dug the point of the bayonet into the cross. It sank easily. But more, the stone began to swing backward, as if hinged on its left side. Ecstatic, Lutz pushed at it with his free hand and found that it was only a façade, no more than an inch thick. It moved easily at his touch, releasing a waft of cold, fetid air from the darkness beyond. Something in that air caused the hair on his arms and at the base of his neck to stand on end.

  Cold, he thought, as he felt himself shiver involuntarily, but not that cold.

  He stifled a growing unease and crawled forward, sliding the lamp ahead of him along the stone floor of the shaft. As he passed it through the new opening, the flame began to die. It neither flickered nor sputtered within its glass chimney, so the blame could not be laid on any turbulence in the cold air that continued to drift past him. The flame merely began to waste away, to wither on its wick. The possibility of a noxious gas crossed his mind, but Lutz could smell nothing and felt no shortness of breath, no eye or nasal irritation.

  Perhaps the kerosene was low. As he pulled the lamp back to him to check, the flame returned to its former size and brightness. He shook the base and felt the liquid slosh around within. Plenty of kerosene. Puzzled, he pushed the lamp forward again, and once more the flame began to shrink. The farther into the chamber he pushed it, the smaller it became, illuminating absolutely nothing. Something was wrong here.

  “Otto!” he called over his shoulder. “Tie the belt around one of my ankles and hold on. I’m going further down.”

  “Why don’t we wait until tomorrow…when it’s light?”

  “Are you mad? The whole detail will know then! They’ll all want a share—and the captain will probably take most of it! We’ll have done all the work and we’ll wind up with nothing!”

  Grunstadt’s voice wavered. “I don’t like this anymore.”

  “Something wrong, Otto?”

  “I’m not sure. I just don’t want to be down here anymore.”

  “Stop talking like an old woman!” Lutz snapped. He didn’t need Grunstadt going soft on him now. He felt uneasy himself, but there was a fortune just inches away and he wasn’t going to let anything stop him from claiming it. “Tie that belt and hold on! If this shaft gets any steeper, I don’t want to slip down.”

  “All right,” came the reluctant reply from behind. “But hurry.”

  Lutz waited until he felt the belt cinch tight around his left ankle, then began to slide forward into the dark chamber, the lamp ahead of him. He was seized by a sense of urgency. He moved as quickly as the confined space would allow. By the time his head and shoulders were through the opening, the lamp’s flame had dimmed to a tiny blue-white flicker…as if the light were unwelcome, as if the darkness had sent the flame back into its wick.

  As Lutz advanced the lamp a few more inches, the flame died. With its passing he realized he was not alone.

  Something as dark and as cold as the chamber he had entered was awake and hungry and beside him. He began to shake uncontrollably. Terror ripped through his bowels. He tried to retreat, to pull his shoulders and head back but he was caught. It was as if the shaft had closed upon him, holding him helpless in a darkness so complete there was no up or down. Cold engulfed him, and so did fear—a combined embrace that threatened to drive him mad. He opened his mouth to call for Otto to pull him back. The cold entered him as his voice rose in an agony of terror.

  Outside, the belt Grunstadt held in his hands began to whip back and forth as Lutz’s legs writhed and kicked and thrashed about in the shaft. There was a sound like a human voice, but so full of horror and despair, and sounding so far away, that Grunstadt could not believe it came from his friend. The sound came to an abrupt gurgling halt that was awful to hear. And as it ceased, so did Lutz’s frantic movements.

  “Hans?”

  No answer.

  Thoroughly frightened, Grunstadt hauled back on the belt until Lutz’s feet were within reach. He then gripped both boots and pulled Lutz back into the corridor. When he saw what he had delivered from the shaft, Grunstadt began to scream. The sound echoed up and down the cellar corridor, reverberating and growing in volume until the very walls began to shake.

  Cowed by the amplified sound of his own terror, Grunstadt stood transfixed as the wall into which his friend had crawled bulged outward, minute cracks appearing along the edges of the heavy granite blocks. A wide crevice jagged up from the space left by the stone they had removed. The few puny lights strung along the corridor began to dim, and when they were nearly out, the wall burst open with a final convulsive tremor, showering Grunstadt with shards of shattered stone and releasing something inconceivably black that leaped out and enveloped him with a single smooth swift flowing motion.

  The horror had begun.

  THREE

  TAVlRA, PORTUGAL

  Wednesday, 23 April

  0235 hours (Greenwich Mean Time)

  The red-haired man suddenly found himself awake. Sleep had dropped away like a loosened cloak and at first he did not know why. It had been a hard day of fouled nets and rough seas; after turning in at his usual hour, he should have slept through until first light. Yet now, after only a few hours, he was awake and alert. Why?

  And then he knew.

  Grim-faced, he pounded his fist once, twice, into the cool sand around the low wooden frame of his bed. There was anger in his movements, and a certain resignation. He had hoped this moment would never come, had told himself time and again that it never would. But now that it was here, he realized it had been inevitable all along.

  He rose from the bed and, clad only in a pair of undershorts, began to roam the room. He had smooth, even features, but the olive tint of his skin clashed with the red of his hair; his scarred shoulders were broad, his waist narrow. He moved with feline grace about the interior of the tiny shack, snatching items of clothing from hooks on the walls, personal articles from the table beside the door, all the while mentally planning his route to Romania. When he had gathered up what he wanted, he tossed everything onto the bed and rolled it up in the bed blanket, tied the roll with string at both ends.

  After pulling on a jacket and loose pants, he slung the rolled blanket across his shoulder, grabbed a short shovel, and stepped out into the night air, cool, salty, moonless. Over the dunes, the Atlantic hissed and rumbled against the shore. He walked to the
landward side of the dune nearest his hut and began to dig. Four feet down the shovel scraped against something solid. The red-haired man knelt and began to dig with his hands. A few quick, fierce movements brought him to a long, narrow, oilskin-wrapped case that he tugged and wrested from the hole.

  It measured five feet or so in length, perhaps ten inches wide and only an inch deep. He paused, his shoulders slumping as he held the case in his hands. He had almost come to believe that he would never have to open it again.

  Putting it aside, he dug farther and came up with an unusually heavy money belt, also wrapped in oilskin.

  The belt went under his shirt and around his waist, the long, flat case under his arm. With the onshore breeze ruffling his hair, he walked over the dune to where Sanchez kept his boat, high on the sand and tied to a piling as proof against the unlikely possibility of its drifting away in a freak tide. A careful man, Sanchez. A good boss. The red-haired man had enjoyed working for him.

  Rummaging in the boat’s forward compartment, he pulled out the nets and threw them on the sand. Next came the wooden box for tools and tackle. This joined the nets on the sand, but not before he had extricated a hammer and nail from its jumbled contents. He walked toward Sanchez’s piling, drawing four Austrian hundred-kronen gold pieces from his money belt. There were many other gold coins in the belt, different sizes from different countries: Russian ten-ruble chevronets, Austrian hundred-shilling pieces, Czech ten-ducats, U.S. double eagles, and more. He would have to depend heavily on the universal acceptance of gold in order to travel the length of the Mediterranean in wartime.

  With two swift, powerful strokes of the hammer, he pierced the four coins with a nail, fixing them to the piling. They’d buy Sanchez a new boat. A better one.

  He untied the rope from the piling, dragged the boat into the quiet surf, hopped in, and grabbed the oars. When he had rowed past the breakers and had pulled the single sail to the top of its mast, he turned the prow east toward Gibraltar, not far away, and allowed himself a final look at the tiny starlit fishing village at the southern tip of Portugal that had been his home for the past few years. It hadn’t been easy to work his way into their trust. These villagers had never accepted him as one of their own, and never would; but they had accepted him as a good worker. They respected that. The work had accomplished its purpose, leaving him lean and tight-muscled again after too many years of soft city living. He had made friends, but no close ones. None he could not walk away from.

  It was a hard life here, yet he would gladly work twice as hard and stay rather than go where he must and face what he must. His hands clenched and unclenched at the thought of the confrontation that awaited him. But there was no one else to go. Only him.

  He could not allow delay. He had to reach Romania as quickly as possible and had to travel the entire 2,300-mile length of the Mediterranean Sea to get there.

  In the recently disturbed corner of his mind was the realization that he might not get there in time. That he might already be too late…a possibility too awful to contemplate.

  FOUR

  THE KEEP

  Wednesday, 23 April

  0435 hours

  Woermann awoke trembling and sweating at the same instant as everyone else in the keep. It was not Grunstadt’s prolonged and repeated howling, faintly audible now through the night, that had done it. Something else had ripped him gasping with terror from his sleep…the feeling that everything had gone suddenly, terribly wrong.

  After a moment of confusion, he shrugged into his tunic and trousers and ran down the steps to the base of the tower. The men were trickling out of their rooms and into the courtyard as he arrived, to gather in tense, muttering groups listening to the eerie howl that seemed to come from everywhere. He directed three of the men toward the arch that led to the cellar stairs. He had just reached the top of the stairs himself when two of them reappeared, white-faced, tight-lipped, and trembling.

  “There’s a dead man down there!” one said.

  “Who is it?” Woermann asked as he pushed between them and started down the steps.

  “I think it’s Lutz, but I’m not sure. His head’s gone!”

  A uniformed corpse awaited him in the central corridor. It lay on its belly, half covered with stony rubble. Headless. But the head had not been sliced off, as with a guillotine, or hacked off—something had torn it off, leaving stumps of arteries and a twisted vertebra protruding from the ragged flesh of the neck. The soldier had been a private, and that was all Woermann could tell at first glance. A second private sat nearby, his wide, blank, staring eyes fixed on the hole in the wall before him. As Woermann watched, the second soldier shuddered and emitted a loud, long, wavering ululation that raised the fine hairs along his nape.

  “What happened here, Private?” Woermann asked, but the soldier did not react. Woermann grabbed his shoulder and shook him but there was no sign in the eyes that he even knew his commanding officer was there. He seemed to have crawled into himself and blocked out the rest of the world.

  The rest of the men were inching down the corridor to see what had happened. Steeling himself, Woermann leaned over the headless figure and went through its pockets. The wallet held an identity card for Private Hans Lutz.

  He had seen dead men before, victims of war, but this was different. This sickened him in a way the others had not. Battlefield deaths were mostly impersonal; this was not. This was horrible, mutilating death for its own sake. And in the back of his mind was the question: Is this what happens when you deface a cross in the keep?

  Oster arrived with a lamp. When it was lit, Woermann held it before him and gingerly stepped through the large hole in the wall. The light bounced off blank walls. His breath puffed white in the air and drifted away behind him. It was cold, colder than it should be, with a musty odor, and something more…a hint of putrescence that made him want to back away. But the men were watching.

  He followed the cool draft of air to its source: a large, ragged hole in the floor. The stone of the floor had apparently fallen in when the wall collapsed. He saw only inky blackness below until he held the lamp over the opening. Stone steps, strewn with rubble from the collapsed floor, led downward. One particular piece of rubble looked more spherical than the others. He lowered the lamp for a better look and stifled a cry when he saw what it was.

  The head of Private Hans Lutz, open-eyed and bloody-mouthed, stared back at him.

  FIVE

  BUCHAREST, ROMANIA

  Wednesday, 23 April

  0455 hours

  It did not occur to Magda to question her actions until she heard her father’s voice calling her.

  “Magda!”

  She looked up and saw her face in the mirror over her dresser. Her hair was down, a glossy cascade of dark brown that splashed against her shoulders and flowed down her back. She was unaccustomed to seeing herself so. Usually, her hair was tightly coiled up under her kerchief, all but a few stubborn strands tucked safely out of sight. She never let it down during the day.

  An instant’s confusion: What day was it? And what time? Magda glanced at the clock. Five minutes to five. Impossible! She had already been up for fifteen or twenty minutes. It must have stopped during the night. Yet when she picked it up she could feel the mechanism ticking away within.

  How strange…

  Two quick steps took her to the window on the other side of the dresser. A peek behind the heavy shade revealed a dark and quiet Bucharest, still asleep.

  Magda looked down at herself and saw she was still in her nightgown, the blue flannel one, tight at the throat and sleeves, and loose all the way down to the floor. Her breasts, although not large, jutted out shamelessly under the soft, warm, heavy fabric, free of the tight undergarments that imprisoned them during the day. She quickly folded her arms over them.

  Magda was a mystery to the community. Despite her soft, even features, her smooth, pale skin and wide brown eyes, at thirty-one she remained unmarried. Magda the scholar, the de
voted daughter, the nursemaid. Magda the spinster. Yet many a younger woman who was married would have envied the shape and texture of those breasts: fresh, unmarred, unsuckled, untouched by any hand but her own. Magda felt no desire to alter that.

  Her father’s voice broke through her reverie. “Magda! What are you doing?”

  She glanced at the half-filled suitcase on the bed and the words sprang unbidden to her mind. “Packing us some warm clothes, Papa!”

  After a brief pause her father said, “Come in here so I don’t wake up the rest of the building with my shouting.”

  Magda made her way quickly through the dark to where her father lay. It took but a few steps. Their street-level apartment consisted of four rooms—two bedrooms side by side, a tiny kitchen with a woodburning stove, and a slightly larger front room that served as foyer, living room, dining room, and study. She sorely missed their old house, but they had had to move here six months ago to make the most of their savings, selling off the furniture that didn’t fit. They had affixed the family mezuzah to the inside of the apartment’s doorpost instead of the outside. Considering the temper of the times, that seemed wise.

  One of her father’s Gypsy friends had carved a small patrin circle on the outer surface of the door. It meant “friend.”

  The tiny lamp on the nightstand to the right of her father’s bed was lit; a high-backed wooden wheelchair sat empty to the left. Pressed between the white covers of his bed like a wilted flower folded into the pages of a scrapbook lay her father. He raised a twisted hand, gloved in cotton as always, and beckoned, wincing at the pain the simple gesture caused him. Magda grasped the hand as she eased down beside him, massaging the fingers, hiding her own pain at seeing him fade away a little each day.

  “What’s this about packing?” he asked, his eyes bright in the tight, sallow glow of his face. He squinted at her. His glasses lay on the nightstand and he was virtually blind without them. “You never told me about leaving.”